Moshe
Feder, in reviewing Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships
(1995), a sequel to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine
(1895), wondered whether there was a term to describe a sequel that
one author writes to another’s work, and coined a wonderfully
apt phrase for that purpose: the “tributary sequel.” Fast
forward two decades to Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind
(2017), and once again we have a Wellsian tributary sequel at hand,
this time following on from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
(1897). The Time Ships was a remarkable achievement, praised enthusiastically by reviewers
and readers upon publication, with Feder himself calling it “one
of the finest of that kind ever done” and “worthy of the
original.” Has Baxter managed that stupendous feat a second
time?

A
careful reading of his novel suggests he may not have set out to. While The
Time Ships introduced a plethora of cutting-edge scientific concepts and a
marvelously cosmic expansion of the original’s scope, The
Massacre of Mankind adheres much more closely to the ideas and scale of The
War of the Worlds. It is a near-future, planetary-bound account written in unassuming
prose. After a few chapters of stage-setting, Baxter unleashes a
second great Martian Invasion in 1920 (in relation to the first’s
1907). Besides some technological advances, the novel’s only
real concessions to modernity may be its nods to Freud and its
depiction of the original account’s narrator—previously
unnamed, now Walter Jenkins—as “unreliable.” This
allows Baxter maneuvering room to reveal depths in Wells’s
story, previously only implied, and to develop the psychology of the
characters Jenkins portrayed more realistically than Wells did,
attributing their simplicities to Jenkins’s rather than Wells’s
myopia.

The
plot of Wells’s original story can be summarized thus: the
Martians came, they conquered, and were vanquished by Earth germs.
Its significance resides not in this plot but in its themes and its
then-innovative application of mock reportage to chronicle far-out
events. Regarding the former, the text itself neatly encapsulates one
of its primary concerns by telling us that “our views of the
modern future must be greatly modified.” In other words, we
must reconsider our place in the scheme of things. Wells himself
described his early scientific romances as “an assault on human
self-satisfaction.” Robert Crossley, in his insightful and
concise book-length study
(1986), refers to the War of the Worlds’s
emphasis on “a Darwinian consciousness of finitude, transience,
and the uncertainty of survival” (p. 9), speculates that it may
be Wells’s “most relentlessly Swiftian castigation of
human sentimentalism” (p. 18) and concludes that “in the
end, the romance is about demoralization” (p. 49). Regarding
the manner of its telling, Crossley notes that “Wells’s
fiction has a distinctive style that grows out of his determination
to seek and present the reality lodged within fantastic occurrences”
(p. 17) and elsewhere refers to this as “a pseudo-documentary
technique” (p. 61). Joseph Conrad captured this notion
beautifully when he called Wells’s “O Realist of the
Fantastic.”

Baxter’s
chronicle shows us how Jenkins—and others—have profited
from their accounts of the War, while also suffering from what we
might call PTSD. The leftover Martian cylinders are studied and
history is altered from what we know in all sorts of interesting ways
(for example, the Titanic,
reinforced with Martian-grade aluminum, is “almost wrecked”),
while England becomes a Germany-allied, incipiently totalitarian
state, heavily propagandistic and ready for war.

The
protagonist of The Massacre of Mankind
(incidentally, a phrase that appears in Wells’s original, and
pleasingly mirrors the original novel’s alliteration) is the
no-nonsense suffragette journalist Julie Elphinstone, ex-wife to
Walter Jenkins’s younger brother Frank. Through her eyes we see
how the first War has left deep scars on England’s psyche and
how it has radicalized its politics. She herself becomes a central
plot element during the second War, though I won’t spoil the
particulars. Her narration is mostly detached but believably human—at
one point, for instance, she comically exhorts herself to be more
analytical. Despite the several hundred pages we spend in her
viewpoint, however, she fails to become a memorable character. Some
of the secondary characters tend to steal the show, though often
(e.g. Book III, Chapter 8) the resolutions of their arcs are
anticlimactic. Then too Julie foreshadows the eventual turn of events
too heavily and far too soon, and then absurdly withholds it from the
reader (Book II, Chapter 5) while sharing it with another character
so we can be kept in “suspense” for another hundred or so
pages. Since the main dramatic tension has already been deflated by
our knowledge that Julie will survive to piece together the chronicle
we’re reading, this additional switch-and-bait feels gratuitous
and at odds with some of Baxter’s other more thoughtful
choices. It also segues into a series of unfortunate chapters, set in
various world locales and introducing a whole new cast of perforce
perfunctory characters, that do little to up the stakes or engage our
interest. Things do pick up at the end, with a clever coda that
returns us to the central Wellsian demoralization.

Throughout
its 450+ pages, Baxter demonstrates a staggering knowledge not only
of Wells’s novel but of its attempted continuations by other
hands and its critical exegeses over the years. His smooth
integration of these elements into his story is to be commended, as
is his imaginative discipline in extrapolating from Wells’s
outdated science in a way that is believably
wrong. There are countless nods to other historical characters, and
as is often the case in such affairs, allusions to Wells himself as a
character. There is no questioning Baxter’s deep affection for
the source material on which he’s riffing, nor the insight with
which he’s internalized its effects on our own literary
history. And he stays true, with some expected embellishments, to
Wells’s themes and journalistic approach.

Perhaps
this ambition to replicate Wells points to one of the book’s
risks. Unlike The Time Ships, a tributary sequel that sprang up vertically through the aeons and
toyed with vast ideas far beyond Wells’s, Baxter has here
produced a horizontal tributary sequel that placidly flows alongside
the first. He’s essentially written a book not of our time, but
of Wells’s time, deliberately and lovingly anachronistic. The
skill of this retro-faithful approach is perhaps the novel’s
most intriguing feature. Whether it will be enough to carry the
ordinary reader through its incident-laden plot and panoply of
lightly-developed characters will depend on the reader’s
penchant for built-in obsolescence.

If
you enjoyed the first volume in this series, or
the
second one, you’ll want to pick up this one too. Its overall quality is
just as high. While each volume-specific editor has left his or her
own unique imprint on that year’s offering, John Joseph Adams
curates the initial eighty stories from which the final twenty are
chosen, so there’s a consistent commitment to excellence built
in to the premise of this editorial process. And by consistency I
don’t mean sameness: Adams searches far and wide, in and out of
genre, to come up with diverse stories that do different things in
various impressive ways. Charles Yu, in this case, has then filtered
this wide-ranging material to a smaller subset of still wide-ranging
material which is now nevertheless more aesthetically and
thematically linked. Karen Joy Fowler’s selections in last
year’s book tended toward the oblique and formally
experimental; Yu also appears to relish textual games, though on the
whole the stories he has selected, despite the cleverness of their
approaches, tend to be more immediately accessible and overtly
concerned with contemporary issues. One might say that Fowler
cherishes the artful ellipsis, while Yu allies himself more with the
exclamation mark—as long, that is, as it’s been reflected
in a funhouse mirror.

As
I did last year, I’ll begin with my five favorites, stories on
whose strength alone I think the anthology recommends itself. A. Merc
Rustad’s “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” is a
poignant, lovely tale that illuminates how maintaining continuity
with ourselves as we age involves maintaining a connection with the
fantasy worlds we visited when we were at our most impressionable.
The cost of severing such links is devastatingly high. (The theme of
personalized portal worlds appears again in Jeremiah Tolbert’s
heartfelt “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass,”
which eloquently asks whether the distance between where we think we
want to be and where we are is as large as we imagine). “The
Future Is Blue” by Catherynne M. Valente creates a vividly
realized, fully lived-in post-floods world through engrossing sensory
detail and allusive specificity; Valente’s tonal virtuosity,
and her proclivity for linguistic and cultural inventiveness, serve
this hard-hitting chronicle about the most hated girl in Garbagetown,
and why she bears that title, extremely well. Caroline M. Yoachim’s
“Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay
Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” made me both
groan and laugh out loud. Constructed as a viciously inward-spiraling
choose-your-own adventure, it explores future medical treatment and
coverage with savage, unrepentant mordacity: “In the clinic, as
in life, decisions that seem important are often ultimately
meaningless.” Dale Bailey’s “Teenagers from Outer
Space” is a complex meditation on the warts of history and how
an unflinching gaze at our circumstances may push us utterly,
irrevocably beyond them. Finally, Brian Evenson’s chilling
“Smear,” deceptively simple in its telling, is notable
for being composed of almost as many questions as it is statements;
various layers of uncertainty—perceptual, ontological,
metaphysical—become embedded in an unforgettable image related
to a crewmember accidentally roused from cryonic sleep and build to a
striking final line.

Other
stories that struck a chord with this reader include Greg van
Eekhout’s “On the Fringes of the Fractal”, which
satirically—and Socratically—pierces the bubble of
contemporary societal homogenization, championing the uniqueness of
stains in an otherwise perfect system; Dale Bailey’s “I
Was a Teenage Werewolf,” which expertly transitions from
factual recapitulation to explosively intimate confessional;
Alexander Weinstein’s melancholy “Openness,” which
pitches security against intimacy and shows how both may become
losers in such a conflict; and Debbie Urbanski’s unsettling
tale of immigration gone wrong, but not in the way you might think,
in “When They Came to Us,” a kind of masterfully deadpan
and subtle upgrade on that classic Twilight Zone
episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

My
selections may admittedly place me at odds with many readers. N. K.
Jemisin’s Hugo- and Locus-finalist “The City Born Great”
is told with great vigor, and literalizes a powerful metaphor, while
Joseph Allen Hill’s meta-(meta?) fictional “The Venus
Effect,, also popular online, cuts to the quick with its recurrent
and unavoidable tragic outcome of racial violence, illustrating not
only current injustices but the very shortcomings of the literary
tropes we often deploy to alternately escape or nominally explore
such injustices. I admire these stories, but they didn’t grab
me in the same way some others did; you may find your experience
diametrically opposed to mine, and more power to you. I would also be
remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s strong work here
by Alica Sola Kim, Nisi Shawl, Peter S. Beagle, Nick Wolven, Leigh
Bardugo, Helena Bell, Genevieve Valentine and E. Lily Yu, many of
whom I’ve praised elsewhere (and some of whom I’m
grateful to have encountered for the first time in this volume). I
suppose most readers these days aren’t easily offended, but I
think it’s worth mentioning that many of this year’s
stories trade in strong language and graphic imagery. Fortunately,
the way they’ve been arranged prevents the kind of
desensitization that might otherwise begin to set in. So read out of
order at your own peril—but know you’ll be rewarded
whatever course you follow.